It seems these days as if everyone has their noses to the grindstone. The number of people that pass out too late and wake up early is shocking right now. It almost as if many have dropped their sleep hours from 8 to just 5.

While it can be easy to operate for a day or two on a lack of sleep, the long-term effects can be detrimental. One big problem is that we can get used to not sleeping enough. After all, why do we need to worry about being a bit sleepy every once awhile?

How Lack Of Sleep Affects The Pre-frontal Cortex

Sleep is imperative to allow the brain to function properly. Many of the remaining body functions can regenerate with relaxation, but not the brain. There was a research done that shows that the pre-frontal cortex becomes more active the more rested people are. It’s one of the main reasons as to why you feel so rested after a short nap. It’s because you gave your brain a jolt of energy.

So with that being the case, you can imagine what happens without the proper amount of rest, your pre-frontal cortex gets exhausted. Now, the reason why this is such an issue is the fact that this part of the brain is extraordinarily important. In particular, that part of the brain attributes your judgement, impulse control, attention and visual association. More or less, when the pre-frontal cortex gets tired, you get loopy. You begin to get super hyper, you develop poor judgement, you can develop hallucinations and more. Being loopy also makes it very difficult to stay focused, as well as do things that normally you wouldn’t. Meaning, you would normally control your impulses, yet that can completely vanish when the pre-frontal cortex is exhausted.

MRIs Results To Show The Effects

Lately, Researchers have been using MRIs to help them understand how sleep affects the brain.

What’s more, they show that it starts to kick in 16 hours into a bout of not getting enough sleep. What that means is -16 hours of you being active without the proper sleep (even if you’ve gotten some sleep during this time) is going to start messing with your ability to function. The craziest part is the fact that the different parts of the brain rest during different phases of sleep. So taking a nap that’s too long will screw with you differently then sleeping for 6 hours. This concludes that you absolutely need to have the proper sleep cycle whenever you go to bed.

Hit the Reset

It leads to an interesting idea that the 8 hours of sleep isn’t just to cool your jets. It essentially allows you to hit the reset button, to let your mind recuperate from all the stress it goes through every day. Think about it, most of your body can rest simply from sitting down. Your brain doesn’t have that option, it has to be active and awake all day long.

We spend so much time making sure that our physical health is up to par that we can sometimes forget the whole things operated by our minds. You owe it to your brain to make sure you get the perfect amount of sleep. It can be tough with twice as much work and half the time to do it, but do get out of there. Only you can make sure that your brain maintains its health.